Actions from last meeting

• Select a new meeting leader for 28 March’s meeting. Today’s meeting leader is: mconley
  • Next meeting leader is: felipe

General Topics / Roundtable

(tips/tricks/FYI, productivity improvements, industry news)

• [mconley] --wait-for-jsdebugger
• [mconley] nglayout.debug.paint_flashing_chrome
  • Flip this to find out where we’re overpainting in our UI
• [standard8] ESLint no-undef has now been enabled for browser/components.
  • Also, patches just landed to enable ESLint generally on sessionstore.
• [florian] nsIPrefBranch.get{Bool,Char,Float,Int}Pref methods now support providing a default value as the second parameter (bug 1338306).
  • ESLint will error if a try block only contains a get{Bool,Char,Float,Int}Pref call (bug 1344711)

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

• Welcome to Sam Foster (:sfoster) and Jim Porter (:squib)!
• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2mHvE8d
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Bharat Raghunathan
    • Deepjyoti Mondal
    • Kevin Jones
    • Svetlana Orlik
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Vedant Sareen [:fionn_mac]
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • Avikalpa Kundu [:kalpa] added a GTest for the Telemetry Histogram API
    • 🌟 Barun Parruck removed some redundant CSS from toolbar.css
    • 🌟 Bharat Raghunathan made Sync logs on Nightly more useful
    • Vineet Reddy removed some unneeded SVGs
    • 🌟 milindl made Control-tab previews more efficient
    • 🌟 Kate Ustiuzhanina removed some unneeded Telemetry for Desktop
    • 🌟 CactusTribe made search engine tooltips more useful
    • 🌟 Subhdeep Saha made Control-tab previews not update until they really need to
    • 🌟 Tony fixed some styling glitches in the Add-ons Manager

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Turning on required permissions on installation of WebExtensions this week.
• Working on streaming download API.
• Graduating first experiment in 55, nsLoginInfo API
  • https://github.com/web-ext-experiments/logins/
• We’ve got some about:debugging improvements coming
  • Will show you your temporary add-ons more clearly
• Virtual file system library on top of indexedDB
• Work to limit add-ons in Firefox 57 will start to land this release
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Firefox57

Activity Stream

• ursula landed a patch that allows the Activity Stream system add-on to override about:newtab
  • This also greatly simplifies nsIAboutNewTabService, as a bunch of the old remotely-hosted newtab stuff got removed
• k88hudson added the first bits of the Activity Stream system add-on to browser/extensions
• jkerim is working on modifying PageMetadata.jsm for Activity Stream’s purposes
• dmose added testing automation of m-c export with push to pineproject branch
• rlr implemented new customization page allowing showing of search/sites/highlights

Content Handling Enhancement

• We’re done! Download progress indication redesign landed and is now in Nightly and Firefox Developer Edition. Special thanks to the front-end engineering and user experience team who worked on the project: Bryant Mao, Carol Huang, Morpheus Chen, Rex Lee, and Sean Lee.

Electrolysis (e10s)

• In order to ensure that our latest-and-greatest devtools are getting enough beta coverage, users on beta will have a greater likelihood of having e10s enabled if they enable devtools
• e10s-multi experiment planned for Firefox 54
• e10s-multi tentatively scheduled to ship to release in Firefox 55 with 4 content processes
  • Recent measurements show that we’re quite competitive, memory-wise, in this configuration
• Took another swing at tab switch spinners with this bug
  • Seeing a ~6% drop in the number of Nightly clients seeing spinners after landing
• Landed a probe to collect data on when tab switch spinners tend to appear
• mconley is working on restoring on-demand tabs in the content process again to improve perceived session start time

Firefox Core Engineering

• Flash
  • Running a telemetry experiment this month on 55 (nightly) to see how the Flash-as-click-to-play-by-default behaves, in advance of a…
  • ...53 release Shield study.
• Crash pings
  • Reminder that FPO is off (ugh) as of 53.
  • Crash pings on Nightly 55 and Aurora 54:
    • ...are being sent by pingSender;
    • ...have content crash pings;
    • ...have raw stacks in those crash pings.
    • Main shutdown pings via pingSender in 55 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1336360)
• Updater
  • Updated orphaning dashboard: https://telemetry.mozilla.org/update-orphaning/.
  • Beginning work on Update Agent, to continue downloading update when session has ended (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1343669).
  • Simplification of Updater UI aimed at 55 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=893505).
  • Changes for MAR signing are unblocked (compression (LZMA) and cert (SHA-384)), aiming for land by the end of Q1.

Form Autofill

• Aiming to wrap up dev milestone 1 in 55. Some developers are starting on milestone 2 items as they finish their M1 ones.
• Starting work on telemetry
• Resolved
  • Use FormAutofillHandler.autofillFormFields to fill in fields
  • Display parsed value in the corresponding column instead of showing JSON string
  • Dialog to add/edit/view an autofill profile
  • Support multiple column autocomplete popup rich list for form autofill feature
• In Progress
  • M1: Add/delete autofill profiles and show add/edit as a subdialog
  • M1: Fallback to form history in two cases
  • M2: [Form Autofill Implement offline heuristics to determine the fieldname of input fields]
  • M2: [Form Autofill Support name fields in profiles]
  • M2: Notify formautofill add-on of which item is being hovered in the suggestion dropdown
  • M2: [Form Autofill Implement offline heuristics to determine the fieldname of input fields]
• UX has a spec to address the phishing concern

Go Faster

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• jessica is adding localization support to the <input type=”time”> input box
• scottwu is making the DateTime picker popup initialize lazily, and has also added RTL support
• ehsan sent out a Quantum Flow Engineering Newsletter that you should read
  • Sync IPC messages are now whitelisted and being removed. Avoid at all costs.
• Some bugs have been filed for better Windows platform integration

Privacy/Security

• Polish work for permission notifications + insecure password warning (live in 52 🔥)
• johannh is working on getting right click + autocomplete/insecure password warning behavior to work correctly for password and username fields (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1337259 + https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1337772)
• nhnt11: A few polish bugs for permissions notifications
• paolo: fixing regressions (and importantly, bug 1345449 - doorhanger won’t stay open when the browser window is minimized)
• Test pilot folks may have an update on the containers experiment (yup!)

Project Mortar (PDFium)

Quality of Experience

• Will soon be handing off most of the Theme API work to the WebExtensions team to allow transitioning to the Photon work.
• Preferences work is moving along, the patches are looking good and we are going through review cycles now. We will keep a fork of the old preferences in the tree in case we need to disable the reorg & search feature.
  • If you’re going to add anything new to Preferences, please make sure jaws or mconley gives r+ or feedback+, just to keep us all in sync
• Continuing to work on performance of importing data from other browsers.
  • Currently looking at a 10 times runtime improvement for bookmark import \o/ 🔥🔥🔥
  • History import improvements have landed on 54 and uplifted to 53.

Search

• New telemetry probes starting to land.
• Working patches posted for hi-res favicons refactoring.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

Storage Management

Test Pilot

• 🔥New experiments🔥: Containers launched March 2nd
  • Intrigued? Try it or read the Hacks post
  • A lot of community interest, running product prioritization through GH upvotes
• Page Shot in 54: on track.
  • For more details, see the spreadsheet or github bug tracker
  • Questions/comments? Say hi in #pageshot or the pageshot-staff mailing list
• Experiments updating this week:
  • Snoozetabs (adding localization and bug fixes)
  • Min Vid (adding better metrics and bug fixes). History/Upcoming queues coming soon
  • Cliqz v2 (new UI) coming soon
• Published our mid-quarter OKR review. Tl;dr looking pretty good
• Please submit your ideas for new Firefox features 🍕🎉

This week I learned